Advanced Machine Engineering for Industrial Machinery

Advanced Machine Engineering

Advanced Machine Engineering effectively establishes a concurrent, multidisciplinary engineering platform, allowing the development of modular machines that can be rapidly configured and confidently assembled to meet your customers’ requirements.

Challenges for industrial machinery and machine tool design

Many industrial machinery manufacturers find themselves facing an increasing number of new requirements, such as the demand for more flexible machine tool designs that can be rapidly adapted to new products, as well as for machines that can be easily integrated into existing plants. In addition, increasing global competition, market demands and regulatory mandates require industrial machinery companies – who serve multiple industries – to continuously innovate and optimize their products. The market not only expects maximum uptime on a day-to-day basis, but also to remain productive for years. In addition, with the introduction of Industrie 4.0, there now lies the challenge of manufacturing with decentralized, autonomous machines that communicate with one another and the products they are manufacturing, so production can be optimized. This adds a whole new level of technology integration requirements.

From Siemens PLM Software’s perspective, “Mission-Driven Machines” define how today’s global industrial machinery market can meet the challenges of delivering machines that are smarter, multi-functional and easier to maintain.

Enabling the plan-to-production innovation process can be difficult. With Siemens PLM Software’s machine design solution, Advanced Machine Engineering, however, your company can begin the product lifecycle management (PLM) journey and improve productivity. Our Advanced Machine Engineering solution ensures greater certainty in the development of mature machines, reducing ramp-up time in production through virtual design and commissioning, which results in better upfront validation, shorter commissioning times, and more immediate productivity.

Rapid Mechatronics Innovation

Historically, machines were purely mechanical. That has clearly changed. Machines need to be smarter, and technology is a big driver of this. Customer demands for greater customization are also forcing manufacturers to use a wide variety of solutions, such as electronics and software, to fulfill these more complex requirements. The need for complex, multi-functional machines puts further pressure on manufacturers and their efforts to improve overall productivity and flexibility. With rapid mechatronics innovation, you can more effectively define and manage the complex and interrelated requirements needed for these machines earlier in the conceptual design phase, integrate electronics and software development with the other machine systems, and virtually commission and validate the machine prior to customer delivery.

Engineering Process Management

To build smarter machines, companies face increasing complexity in their design and manufacturing processes. These processes are shifting from configure-to-order (CTO) to engineer-to-order (ETO). To be able to control and manage the complete end-to-end process, manufacturers need greater visibility to changes that could impact the quality and cost of the machine as well as the delivery time to customers. The Advanced Machine Engineering solution provides you with an integrated view of how your design and manufacturing decisions can impact the final machine program. Integrating key aspects such as requirements, configuration, change and project management improves overall quality, speed and productivity while reducing delivery risks and costs.

Integrated CAD/CAM/CNC and Machine Commissioning

With the reduced development time for machines and the fact that automation engineers are usually on the critical path for proving-out the machine operation, having the ability to visualize programming sequences virtually can keep projects on schedule for customer delivery. Leveraging SINUMERIK, our Advanced Machine Engineering solution provides additional capabilities for integrating automation design with the rest of the machine design to provide complete coverage across CAD, CAM and CNC. Modeling of the machine operation sequences, association of the automation signals to the physical behavior of the machine, communication of CAM profiles and drive behaviors and support of drive programming allow machine manufacturers to more effectively validate the machine’s design and operation virtually, before a physical machine exists.